Downtown is a place of activity where people are efficiently connected so that they can rapidly move to other places of activity efficiently. Downtown may be the core, it may be connected transit hubs. Some suburbs are starting to grow transit hubs. Well connecting these transit hubs to each other, where ever they are makes them part of downtown.

The fringe transit hubs are/”will be” part of the new downtown.

Sure, it would be great if new immigrants could move downtown, but it’s not going to happen. Instead, these newcomers have transformed the fringes into thriving, mixed-use communities where a strip mall parking lot doubles as a market/social gathering place for Tamils and Somalis.

Check Ian Chodikoff’s excellent and thought-provoking new Fringe Benefits exhibition, on at the Design Exchange (yes, it’s downtown). What’s really happening in the suburbs deserves your serious attention.

I appreciate much of what you talk about in your blog. But I wish you would talk more about the rich/poor split– some people have incomes where choices like Westchester vs. Hoboken are simple choices between two easy alternatives. For so many outside the well-paid creative minority, folks are faced with tough choices, where they are damned either way.

I hope you’ll consider writing more about the janitors and cooks who work in the creative environments as you do your excellent work of analysis.

The suburbs can’t be worse.

Compact efficient cities only have room for only a few people to drive. People need to live close to good public transportation that will rapidly take them to centers of activity. People require a place to relax and enjoy nature. And no one wants to live a bad neighbourhood. Redeveloping is more than just replacing old buildings. It is creating compact efficient interconnected communities .

Suburbs are domed as the destination of the well to do and here is why.

Short travel time and the ability to multi-task while commuting are time factors controlly an educated professionals ability to apply the extra effort required to compete.

The world is a small place for educated professionals. Most educated professionals move up the wage latter not with a company, but by movies between companies. Each move providing a rapid intense learning process which not only benefits the individual, it also benefits the company as well. This wage mobility and competitive work place is a tremendous economic benefit.

Work hard, play harder, the motto of well paid. Playing hard is all about the people you play with, not what game you play. The energy we get from interacting with others is what drives us and keeps us alive. On transit you can start up a conversation with a person beside you or with a person over the phone. When you are driving you need to keep you attention on the road. Personally I have made most of my friends chatting on airplanes, trains and other forms of transit.

After hard work and play we all get burnt. What better way to relax and escape than surrounded by trees. We need this to keep ourselves sane. Unfortunately the back yard is not big enough for this. A park is a good place, but if you have to drive to a park, than park you are driving to is a parking lot. And nothing is closer to a dead desert than a parking lot. It is much better to be take transit and bike to a large green park. Better still is a shared green space close at hand.

Transit hubs with high rise housing, a choice of services, shopping and green space are the future and will attract the young educated profession who wants to settle down.

Rather than tax fuel, a limited number of licenses should auctioned to urban residents. With bicycles making up a larger percentage of the urban traffic, roads would be lot safer.

The suburbs of today are designed and build for cars and not people. Suburbs are a land usage and pollution disaster, simply because social cost and benefits of land usage are not taken into consideration. The US sub prime crises is in reality also a housing crises which can be best solved by redevelopment, not new development. Developing of new land well discarding existing developed land simply results in either the old development or the isolate new development being in practical terms discarded and worthless.

Suburbs are gobbling up the best farm land, because the social cost of losing this farm land forever is simply not reflected in the land price. To reflect this cost a land usage transitioning tax needs to be charged when ever land is transformed from natural wilderness or farm usage to urban or industrial usage. The land usage transition tax should be 8 times the selling price for farm or forestry usage. Also land in its natural green state, whether it is forests, farmland or parks within a city needs to be taxed a much low rate to reflects its social benefit.

Property value taxes do not accurately reflect the social value of land. High value land enjoying access to social transit services are under valued. As a result people sit on this land preventing redevelopment. This prevents redevelopment of this high value land, insuring continued low property values and denying cost effective higher density redevelopment. Many more people would have an opportunity to enjoy access to transit if this was not the case. Land near transit should be taxed based on the access to transit it provides. This land near transit should taxed at the same rate regardless whether it is 30 story high rise condo, or a parking lot. Height restrictions near transit are senseless. Green space regulations however do make sense.

History is about to repeat is itself.

Much of the hardship suffered in the great depression was the result of incredibly destructive land practices we would not even dream of today.
http://www.cyberspaceag.com/visitafarm/southwestkansasfarming.htm
One of the farming practices of that time was to burn the stubble – the plant stalks left after harvesting. At this time, all fields were planted back to a crop and burning made it easier to plant. But, burning destroyed the organic matter that would help the soil. One of the favorite farm implements of the time was called a “one-way”. This implement would turn the stubble under, saving the organic matter, but it left the soil exposed to the hot sun and dry winds.

To Quote the author.
We here in Southwest Kansas have learned to live with “Mother Nature” rather than fighting her!

And maybe suburbs will continue to play that role of extending and connecting different urban cores. Between families who can’t afford to live in the urban core, and couples who work in different urban nodes and want to live halfway in-between, the market for suburban homes isn’t going to completely disappear.

But as suburbs spread out, they created their own problems. The 2 hour auto commute was poor quality time spent neither on work nor with family. Throw in yardwork and chauffeuring the kids everywhere, and life quality diminished even more. The quality of life that included theater, live music and museums along with parks became more attractive.

However, even as a dedicated city lover, I’m not among those that think the suburbs will disappear. Those houses are built and are going to be used. Whether it’s as neglected slums or some new models is unknown. I’d bet on new transportation and community models, but don’t know what they’d be.

Also, what I find interesting is that the older, historic neighborhoods near downtowns or along street car lines to downtown– that were designed to be walkable because cars didn’t exist or were not common when they were built — are those seeing a renaissance now.

The 1920s (or may be its the 1930s now) are back in so many ways.